Highlights

1997: Pentax - Das Album

Pentax was an alias — as best I can tell, now dormant — of the prolific Cologne-based producer Reinhard Voigt; Das Album should probably be considered a classic of the more uncompromising end of minimal techno. Music so pure and obdurate is hard enough to find.

Das Album seems to be constructed entirely in the unfolding of its own endless undulating surface, its rhythms — sometimes with a brutal (Schaffel-ish?) swing — all but stripped of reference to any approximation of acoustic instrumentation. Especially at the right volume (loud!), the whole thing feels like it’s occupying every available space with an almost-oppressive presence, wholly opposed to the crisp precision of certain other strands of techno. As tracks progress, they are often interspersed or overlaid with sounds reminiscent of malfunctioning, decomposing machinery, introducing an unpredictability that has nothing to do with human impulsiveness and that does nothing to disperse the immediacy of it all. Even as it feels as though its lack of clear hooks, melodies, track titles, etc. might render it remote and inaccessibly abstract, Das Album is utterly concrete in its unadulterated devotion to the pulsing mechanics of its sound.

It’s slightly surprising, then, to find that, in the briefest of one-line descriptions typical of the sparseness of information available about it, Kompakt’s website suggests that Das Album is a concept album. For my part though, I’m damned if I can figure out what the concept actually is — there’s barely a concession to the cerebral or emotional life of the listener (not that this means the majority of the time it gives the impression of being geared toward dancefloor euphoria!). But maybe, rather than being in conformity with some misplaced stereotype of “Teutonic” directness, the amusingly blunt title of the album might be the best clue. Perhaps the concept is simply that it is an album at all — a coincidence of form and concept, so to speak, noteworthy in a genre that often might seem to revolve around 12-inch singles intended to be slipped into someone else’s mix. But I speculate. And, mysterious concept notwithstanding, Das Album certainly does feel like an album — if that implies the coherence of the tracks, and particularly if it implies their progression from one to the next. Das Album develops in its own peculiar and arresting way, from its leaden, almost inert beginnings, through the unremitting throb of the second untitled track — a personal highlight, the mechanistic heartbeat of the album — to the slivers of atmosphere and hints of depth and layering that breach the endless repetition later in the album.

It may be that the reason for Das Album’s relatively unsung status is its having been overshadowed by more celebrated contemporaries. It came out, after all, on Profan, a label founded by Wolfgang Voigt prior to the important Kompakt label. Reinhard Voigt is also, of course, brother of and collaborator with Wolfgang Voigt, whose work as Gas, as Studio 1, as M:1:5, among numerous others, is (rightly) acclaimed — in fact, Profan’s entire catalog is pretty much composed of releases by one of the two. Das Album shared a place with a number of projects that laid down a template for German minimal techno — a template in my view barely surpassed inside or outside the constraints of the genre. Yet Das Album strikes me as being at the very least the equal of any of these in its stark single-mindedness.

The No Alternative comp was a big deal as far as I was concerned at 14, and going back to it, I find it still resonates. The live rendition of The Breeders’ “Iris” has long been the definitive version (“just gotta start real slow”), and the experience of watching Kim sing it on the MTV special pretty much cemented her rock & roll essence into my music-junkie bloodstream. Of course, I played the Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins tracks over and over, and even enjoyed Soul Asylum’s take on “Sexual Healing.” I bawled listening to Bob Mould’s heart-wrenching “Can’t Fight It” and sang along with Buffalo Tom’s insanely catchy “For All To See.” I was a bit green yet to grasp Pavement, but it put a bug in there.

While I’ve forsaken a good deal of the “alternative” 90s music I listened to, revisiting this comp proved fortuitous, as it led me to the brisk gloom rock gem that is “Heavy 33” by a New Zealand band I know little about called The Verlaines. Not sure why this one was absorbed in the folds, ‘cause I hear it now accompanied with all the alarm bells and firecrackers associated with thrilling discovery. The chorus is not only infectious but sports some of the best lyrics I’ve ever encountered in a despondent anthem:

“I’m striving to coax or wrench you - I can’t even reach you
You’re starving for something - I’ve got nothing to feed you
And renegade good intentions turn to scorn
All the clouds keep hoarding
All their airborne oceans won’t fall”

Sung in a rich, menacing tenor by front man Graeme Downes, these lines feel like something etched in the firmament. The frustration of butting our heads against recalcitrant lifeforms in the hope that they’ll open themselves up to us is conjured with such poise as to render every other angsty 90s anthem hopelessly moot. This is a great song that should be played as a replacement every time some alterna-DJ is about to queue up “I’ll Stick Around” or “Everything’s Zen” from here till the end of radio as we know it (while there’s still time). As for my lil’ corner, I know it will be something in the rotation for many mixes to come.

(Turns out the fine S.F. Seals cover is also a Verlaines tune and it is not too shabby either.)

I think everyone spends about 90% of their time at the age of 15 being an insufferable holier-than-thou prick. It just comes with the territory of being in that stage of life where at once you discover that some day you’re gonna be a wholly (sorta) self-sufficient (sorta) person, but at the same time, you’re having to vigorously figure out all the who/what/when/where/how etc. of that actually coming to pass. (The less you think on the “why,” the better.) I tend to consider myself lucky, because I did a pretty good job of forgetting everything that happened to me between 13 and 17; not that capital b Bad things happened, it’s just more like I was bad and annoying and weird, and it was constantly happening. One thing I cringe about a lot now is thinking about how I related to other people in terms of music; I steadily d/evolved from being a kid who bought Coldplay CDs in 2004 to someone sternum deep in the overpowering thrall of my own smug, lookin’ down my acne-embossed nose at the gherkins around me clutching thrice-microwaved sub-Strokes posters from Smash Hits (Remember The Bravery? That was an interesting fortnight). I was insuffrerably superior about just about everything. Led Zeppelin? Buncha cocks I tell you (though the only song I knew was “Stairway to Heaven,” and I got it confused with “Tales of Brave Ulysses” on at least one occasion — don’t ask). Asshat misogynists! Look, I could dwell on this (don’t ask me about the time someone asked me if I knew who The Smiths were when I was 15), but in any/every case, I was roundly, solidly a jerk.

Yet, if you caught me at a time when I found Young Marble Giants or the family tree thereof you’d find me completely without a smart-ass answer — completely silent — and the frosty solitude of Colossal Youth still reduces me when I am listening to it to whatever is essential about me, and nothing else. There’s something path-breakingly singular about Alison Stratton’s voice; a strange snowglobe, the coldest little warm pocket in the world; I’d come up against something beguiling, in that it made exactly enough space for you, just as you were underneath whatever bluster you wore and allowed nothing more — no ego, no pretension. If you were going to talk about it, you had to lower your voice, get yourself on its terms. There was no other way to experience it, and the same magic persisted with Alison Stratton’s post-YMG band Weekend.

Sorry I took the long way around, but The ‘81 Demos were and are catnip for anyone, and the new reissue on Blackest Ever Black gives these tracks the full ceremony they’re overdue for.

Based on the familiar elements that Colossal Youth was built from, ‘81 is a snapshot of a band yet to explore their more jazzy tendencies, but already excelling at the art of writing songs as heartbreaking as they are simple. “Nostalgia” is astonishing, in the way it bridges Harmonia and the moments of Here Come the Warm Jets when you think Eno doesn’t have his tongue in cheek in a way that’s almost futuristically plain, in a fashion that people are still somehow throwing $15 at Real Estate to streamline into pure bore. If Beach House ever write a line as effective as “And the thoughts will make you pray for old friends/ Some of them you see sometimes/ Some of them are dead,” buy me a Coke; if there’s one that hides a lyrical throatpunch like “Nostalgia” does, I’ll buy you coke. “Red Planes,” with its twisting progression, is like “Skank Bloc Bologna” for people who know there are much wider and larger things than living in a squat, which makes it probably the best thing I’ve heard all year.

“Summerdays Instrumental” might scan on sight as maybe the least essential thing here if you’re a trainspotter, but it throws into even sharper relief the absolute gorgeousness of what Weekend’s sound was prior to their detours into the more Parisian cafe elements of themselves, mapping out a territory between Lawrence and Maurice Eubanks sitting on a spring porch before their working relationship (and Felt) went south. Do you have porches in England? Fax me. The guitar break that sings out of the main melody is too good for words. I’ve hung up on Skype calls to listen to it. I’m sorry, Mum. In any case, the brilliance of everything and everyone associated with Young Marble Giants was the creation of a music that was both too small to be listened to with any degree of attention lower than complete and too deep not to fall into completely. It’s a lesson in art that bears endless repeating, and this is some of the richest evidence on the family tree.

Einstürzende Neubauten represent everything that was great about the post-punk era, a savage union of aesthetic violence and intellectual refinement that seemed plentiful as the air in the late 70s and early 80s. A foundational band in the lineage of industrial music, Neubauten took the burgeoning genre to its most literal extreme, incorporating scrap material, homemade instruments, and power tools into their work. The results were often predictably brutalizing, yet there was also a poetic quality to frontman Blixa Bargeld’s lyrics that lent the songs a kind of malefic beauty (provided you could speak German, or otherwise obtain English translations of the lyrics, that is).

During their 1986 tour in support of their third album Halber Mensch, the group collaborated with experimental filmmaker Sogo Ishii to create a document of their visit to Japan. You couldn’t ask for a more harmonious meeting of the minds.

Einstürzende Neubauten literally translates to “collapsing new buildings,” but its connotations in German are far more subversive. The Germans use the word neubauten to describe architecture that sprang up in the wake of World War II, versus altbauten, the older (and often sturdier and more beautiful) buildings from the pre-war period. The band’s name, therefore, signifies the implosion of the new order, the collapse of a flimsy myth of progress over a tragic history. Sogo Ishii, meanwhile, came to prominence in the early 80s through a series of guerilla sci-fi films that helped define cyberpunk cinema in Japan. The movement’s Western counterparts — novelists like Bruce Sterling and William Gibson and filmmakers like Ridley Scott (with Bladerunner) or Paul Verhoven (with Robocop) — spun futures in which a declining US was being eclipsed by megalithic corporations and an influx of Eastern culture, where scrappy computer hackers pulled noirish capers in virtual realms of ones and zeros that we would later come to know as the internet. Japanese cyberpunk was often more dystopian in vision. In place of sprawling megacities, we have post-industrial wastelands roamed by gangs and outlaws. In place of cybernetic prostheses and implants that blur the distinction between human and machine, we have invasive technologies that corrupt and pervert the human body.

Ishii is best known internationally for Burst City, a punk rock musical about biker gangs resisting the construction of a Yakuza-funded power plant in their part of town. One can see echoes of his earlier film — this fusion of post-apocalyptic science fiction and music video sensibilities — in Halber Mensch. In just under an hour, the film flits from staged performance to music video to documentary to live concert footage and back, without really batting an eyelash. Except for a chunk of footage toward the end from a soundcheck and actual live performance at a Japanese club, most of the action takes place in an abandoned foundry. The stark backdrop of industrial ruin and desolation fits nicely into the aesthetic universes of both parties. Neubauten look perfectly at home on that dirt floor amid the scarred pillars, mechanical waste, and shattered windows, while Ishii brings an atavistic beauty to the proceedings by intercutting the band’s performance with images of scrapyards, feeding protozoa, and buildings being demolished.

The footage of Neubauten performing is arresting and captures the brute physicality of those early shows. You see Alexander Hacke flailing at his guitar; F.M. Einheit, N.U. Unruh, and Mark Chung crouched over their homemade instruments like mad scientists, often scrambling from station-to-station mid song; and, of course, a wildly coifed Blixa Bargeld strutting from one end of his rude stage to the other like some unholy combination of Mick Jagger and Darth Vader. Still, the film’s indisputable high point would have to be the videos for its two-song centerpiece “Halber Mensch” and “Z.N.S.”

The title track is one of Neubauten’s most lovely and terrifying compositions, a stunning four-and-a-half-minute a capella arrangement about the hobbling of man by a technocratic society. It’s a theme that clearly resonated with Ishii and his contemporaries, and it inspired some of the film’s most terrifying imagery. Einheit watches his leg get devoured by worms, while other band members wander through a dilapidated labyrinth, encountering a series of grotesque Butoh dancers: two men bound together by their heads in a wire lattice, another leering pair lumbering around in an upright 69 position, and finally a ghostly figure with a feeding tube clenched in its teeth.

On “Z.N.S.,” this final figure is joined by a host of pale men and women clad in loincloths and scrap metal. The dancers stagger into formation around him, their movements tortured and spastic. They jerk and writhe to the song’s emaciated dance beat with faces contorted into grins of malevolent joy. Gradually, their dancing devolves into combat, with performers shoving, wrestling, grappling for one another’s throat. When the lead female dancer breaks the fourth wall and begins creeping toward the camera, one can’t help but feel a surge of fear, as though we were interlopers at some demonic revel who have drawn the attention of our hosts.

Aside from being a kick-ass document of Neubauten in their prime, Halber Mensch helps to underscore just how influential the band has been. It’s easy to see that their sonic progeny include a broad swath of artists, ranging from industrial noise punks like Missing Foundation to the more populist, family-friendly fare like Blue Man Group. What the film also demonstrates is how quietly the band’s visuals have been appropriated by their more famous (and often markedly less talented) successors. Rammstein seems to have inherited Neubauten’s love of setting shit on fire, and I’d be surprised if Floria Sigismondi hadn’t seen the “Z.N.S.” segment prior to directing Marilyn Manson’s video for “The Beautiful People.” Don’t let that put you off, though. Halber Mensch still looks and sounds as fresh and invigorating as it did those nigh-30 years ago when it was first released

P.S. If you’re interested in learning more about Sogo Ishii and Japanese cyberpunk, I’d recommend checking out Mark Player’s enlightening essay on the subject for Midnight Eye. Happy viewing.

My son doesn’t like Fraggle Rock. But what does he know? He’s only 3! I can’t get him on it, but I think it’s a solid show; I even started re-watching it several years before I had my son, which was over 20 years after the show originally aired, thanks in large part to my then-coworker who stole Season 1 for me (as a joke). And, to my surprise, the show resonated with me after all those years. Maybe it was because of the relatively progressive, sometimes even socialist undertones — the dialectic between work and play, the questioning of monarchies and social structures, the critical awareness of its protagonists — or maybe it was because Wembley is FUCKING CUTE, but in any case, the show’s fun to watch from various perspectives.

For a program that relies heavily on music — “music is the greatest of the Fraggles’ art forms,” says Uncle Traveling Matt — most of it has not aged very well. But there are moments during the series that are downright exquisite. One such example is from episode 9 of the first season. In this episode, Gobo and Red find a map that leads to “The Treasure of the Ancient Fraggles.” With the help of Wembley, Mokey, and Boober, The Fraggles go on a search for the treasure, which they fantasize as being five million diamonds. When they finally reach their destination, however, The Fraggles discover that the actual treasure is much sweeter, much more valuable, much more transcendent than diamonds. Sniff, sniff. Check it out for yourself:

Sometimes the destiny of a song is determined by its placement on an album. An exceptional tune can get lost in the shuffle, even for the most diehard fans, due simply to its position in the album’s tracklist. “Little Mascara,” the penultimate track on The Replacements’ cite>Tim, is one such song, sandwiched unfortunately between two of the most iconic songs in the Mats catalog, “Left of the Dial” and “Here Comes A Regular.”

But judging “Little Mascara” out of the context of the album, it’s clear that it deserves more love. The track is about a woman in an unhappy marriage. Her husband (partner?) treats her like shit and then leaves her. By the end, Paul Westerberg sings a line that about how she wanted “someone to be scared of” — i.e., a bad boy. Still, the morality of the track comes into question, since, at the beginning of the song, Westerberg sings “You and I/ Fall together/ You and I/ Sleep alone,” which makes one wonder if this woman was having an affair with the narrator. Yep, all of this happens in this three-and-a-half-minute song.

It’s an interesting song that’s well worth another listen. Revisit it here:

There's a lot of good music out there, and it's not all being released this year. With DeLorean, we aim to rediscover overlooked artists and genres, to listen to music historically and contextually, to underscore the fluidity of music. While we will cover reissues here, our focus will be on music that's not being pushed by a PR firm.